The influence of the socio-cultural environment and personality on attitudes towards Human Rights

Ziebertz, Hans-Georg

Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Unser, Alexander

Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Döhnert, Susanne

Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Sjöborg, Anders

Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Theology, Department of Theology, The Social Sciences of Religion, Sociology of Religions. Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Theology, Uppsala Religion and Society Research Centre. (Impact of Religion)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6909-9665

National Category

Research subject

Identifiers

Projects

The Impact of Religion - Challenges for Society, Law and Democracy

Funder

Swedish Research Council

Note

In their comparative empirical research among youth in Palestine and Germany, Webb, Ziebertz, Curran and Reindl (2012) showed that attitudes towards human rights depend religion, values and the country of residence. The result of this study was that respondents’ socio-cultural context was of significance when the same respondents were asked to value statements about human rights. That culture and society have a formative influence is supported by Margaret Archer’s social theory on human action (1995, 1996, 2000, 2003). According to Francis and Robbins (2013), however, the theoretical and empirical weakness of this approach is that it neglects the importance of individual factors. In their study among British youth, Francis and Robbins made the point that personality is of major importance as far as attitudes towards human rights are concerned. Indeed, using Eysenck’s Personality Scale (Eysenck & Eysenck 1991, Francis et al. 1992, Francis et al. 2001), Francis and Robbins showed that personality influences people’s attitudes towards human rights. However, the limitation of Francis and Robbins’s study is that these authors failed to include socio-cultural factors in their conceptual model. Given this, Francis and Robbins may have been able to show that personality is significant, but they have no findings about the relevance of personality compared with socio-cultural factors (on attitudes towards human rights). This means that the question which is of more significance remains unanswered. This research study aims to fill this explanatory gap. Our empirical analysis includes both socio-cultural attitudes and personality characteristics. The general hypothesis is that respondents’ socio-cultural contexts are of much more importance than personality characteristics. Our sample (N=3,982) is based on a selection of respondents from six different countries in Europe, Asia and Africa; this distribution allowed us to make a broad comparison of the influence of both socio-cultural contexts and personality. Our empirical findings confirm the hypothesis that, in all measurements, the explanatory relevance of the socio-cultural context is obvious and that the influence of personality is very low as far as the respondents’ attitudes towards human rights are concerned. The results are relevant to the necessary contextualisation of human rights education.